The use of electronic data storage is widespread in the industrialized world. Business and personal records that might previously have been stored in both paper and electronic form are often now stored only in electronic form. Various data protection techniques (e.g., file system checkpoints) have been conceived to enable recovery of data that would otherwise be lost when physical storage devices fail, become corrupted, or have been inadvertently lost. However, these techniques are continually being forced to scale to support larger collections of data because of the adoption of networked storage and the relatively rapid increase in the amount of data being created. In view of this situation, it is desirable to have techniques for facilitating recovery from device failure and data corruption while preserving good performance for client access from a network.